But it was still enough of the addiction dose to make you continue on and on, and on, and on.

No, no, no. [Laughs. He said, "Yes, I'm Jim." CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah. Do you get, CLIFFORD SCHORER: No, no. CLIFFORD SCHORER: No, no, no, no, no.

It's Triceratops Cliffbut this is entre nous. JUDITH RICHARDS: But for you as an individual collector? Talking about architecture? Those things are fun. [00:35:58].

This huge chandelier. JUDITH RICHARDS: Mm-hmm.

I don't want to do anything fancy." I loved the flea markets in Paris in those days. JUDITH RICHARDS: So the only alternativeif the person can be convincedis if you just offer them cash to buy it, and then you have a part of your inventory. These 27 are unaffordable. We'll get into that in a few minutes. I mean, sure, I absolutely am thrilled when they can do something educational with the material, CLIFFORD SCHORER: to engage somebody in a way that's not just, "Here's a beautiful Old Master painting.". So I'm sure that somewhere they've usedyou know, time goes by, and they use your name.

And that's generallyyou know, you build upon the scholars of the past, and the next scholar may say no.

Do I say, you know, "Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, because I know how much this costs, where it came from, blah, blah, blah?" But, of course, the ones who did press me in a different wayand I can names, but I won'tthe ones who kind of tried to sort of turn that conversation into a purchasing experience or get lost, they were out of my book before the 15 minutes was by, because I knew they were charlatans. It was featured in the second episode of the BBC TV series Fake or Fortune?. And heby the time I knew him, he had retired as, I think, the 50- or 60-year chief engineer of Grumman Aerospace, sofor their plants, not for their aircraft manufacturing.

CLIFFORD SCHORER: each moment that I hit upon an artist's name that I didn't know, I would go off on another tangent. [Laughs.] So, you know, those are the kinds of things that happen more frequently, which is that one finds a hand in a Carlo Maratti painting, and one then goes and finds that the Albertina has that hand in a sketchbook that is known to have been by [Andrea] Sacchi or Maratti. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So, it, you knowit's been very, JUDITH RICHARDS: They recognize your interest, the.

And so the National Gallery has our historic stock books and archive. I mean, but I didn't, you know, I wasn't trying to make myself a gadfly in the market, or even a gadfly in the curatorial world. We all say, "What's wrong? He would give me projects to do.

JUDITH RICHARDS: Did Skinner know what was happening? The reality was, it was cheap.

And recently, Milwaukeeso I love Tanya Paul; she's the curator at Milwaukee. CLIFFORD SCHORER: You have to have a much broader and thinner support base. And again, I mean, I don'tbecause it's not a family legacy business for me; I'm not planning on handing this off to a son, so I have to think very carefully about what the next generation of the Agnew's company will be. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah. And usually it would be a letter at that point. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah, with plenty of Q&A.

CLIFFORD SCHORER: Dorothy Fitzgerald. No, no. The Rubens House, the Frans Snyders House, the Rockox House. JUDITH RICHARDS: You just didn't want to think about selling? So they used to have in their little museumsthey probablyonce, back in the '50s and during communism, they probably had these Thracian pieces, you know, that they found in the ground, and then the National Museum sort of pulled them all into the National Museum. CLIFFORD SCHORER: and previously had been unassociated. [00:30:00]. So I wrote that program in a month. CLIFFORD SCHORER: In Provincetown. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yes. I'm not opposed to the popularizers of history. And then, you know, you may 10 years later find that Molenaer is worth five, or he's worth 500. Or not. The Allori that was sold at Northeast Auctioneers, which came from the Medici Archives, and I found it in the Medici Archives two hours before the auction. WebThe painting was made by Winslow Homer, one of the most important American artists of the 19th century. He told mehe shared that with me when I was 26, which I had not known. So I was independent; I mean, I was independent from a very young age. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Of which I can appreciate; I mean, I understand that.

So you have lots of interesting things in Bulgaria, but they're basically in the sort of, you know, big, communist, ornate, central museum in Sofia. [Laughs.] And I said, "I wantjust let me in." Are there any other thoughts you have about the responsibilities of a collector, at least in your field?

CLIFFORD SCHORER: That was based on opportunism, because some of the greatestsix of the greatest Pre-Raphaelite paintings ever made were available to us at that moment. [4], On the day before the sale, Simon Murray (the great grandson of Sir Henry Blake) claimed ownership of the painting on behalf of the family. So, CLIFFORD SCHORER: In Spain, in Madrid. Do you havedo you maintain storage? CLIFFORD SCHORER: I don't even know. CLIFFORD SCHORER: No. They had a [Hans] Hoffmann of a hare, a painting of a hare, which was, you know, a world-class masterpiece, and they had a Sebastiano Ricci, a big Sebastiano Ricci. JUDITH RICHARDS: Well, this might be a good point to end today. CLIFFORD SCHORER: I remember going there. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Oh, all the time, yeah. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah. And you know, there's no way I'm ever going to get it back. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So when I bought my examplethe triceratopsthere was an editorial in the New York Times about my piece, saying that some rich person's going to hide it away in their castle. Now, we have to be very responsive if that changes. [00:34:00]. So the short answer is that they may like to have it. And I'm saying, "That can't be possible.

So I went to TEFAF; Hall & Knight hadthis must have been 2000had a phenomenal booth. [Affirmative.] So, I lost it. That I was.
And, you know, we can cover a lot of ground. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Well, the story is, I would say, more humorous than anything else, because my thought was that someday, when I was an old lonely geezer, I would have an antique shop, or I would sell bric-a-brac. And I've been in Boston ever since.

JUDITH RICHARDS: You said it's atthey're both at the Worcester? JUDITH RICHARDS: And he drove a Model T? JUDITH RICHARDS: [Laughs.] He had eyelashes of copper. And, JUDITH RICHARDS: So, a library, because it wasthey were liquidating? Yeah, and, of course, you know, if you think about return on equity, and you're in the business world, you understand that with the inventory turn of a gallery being as slow as it is, buying something and hanging it on the wall is often a very bad business decision. Schorer also recalls Anna Cunningham; George Abrams; Sydney Lewis; Chris Apostle; Nancy Ward Neilson; Jim Welu, as well as Rita Albertson; Tanya Paul; Maryan Ainsworth; Thomas Leysen; Johnny Van Haeften; Otto Naumann; and Konrad Bernheimer, among others.

I've been giving them photographs for their book of my collection of works, and I know they've been sort of on the hunt for other good photographs. You can spend as much money as you want; if you open a door, you're going to change the humidity. But certainly, it'sthere are some artists who, in a combination of craft and conception or conceit, jump off the page at me, and I say, This is an artist I want to own.

They will charge the buyer 20 to 25 percent." So, you know, one major painting today selling for $25 million, even though the gallery may only make a commission on it, is still more than the gallery sold in adjusted dollars in 1900. Came back to public school in Massapequa, Long Island, because that was the most convenient homestead we could use, and failed every class. JUDITH RICHARDS: So you describe the place you live in Boston as not as having one work of art, right now. In every house, there are 15 of them. I'm reasonably good at language, and I tried.

[00:12:01], JUDITH RICHARDS: And some collectors might just be focused on the visual experience, knowing the importance artistically, but. And, CLIFFORD SCHORER: Probably about 10 years ago, where I just said, you know, maybe. And I would buy all kinds of crazy things. You know, I never thought of it as a practical way to improve the quality of the collection until recently, like until the last 10 years.

They told me the price range was 5 to 6 million, I believe, and I thought that was odd that they would quote a price range. I mean, you read the stock books; you just are in awe that, you know, on every page of the stock book is a painting that we now know from a collection, a public collection. . So, no, I didn't look to the collection to fund the next wave of the collection. JUDITH RICHARDS: or show people the works there? And I had to take it into various pieces. WebHome Uncategorized clifford schorer winslow homer. I ended up going to Boston University in a program that they created for, shall we say, eccentric-track children. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah, yeah.

And I knew those as pivot points in the history of the world. [4] Miss Varney rejected the revised offer and Sotheby's followed their normal policy, withdrawing the painting because they could not guarantee a good title to anyone who bought the work. The interview was conducted by Judith Olch Richards forthe Archives of American Art and the Center for the History of Collecting in America at the Frick Art Reference Library of The Frick Collection, and took place at the offices of the Archives of American Art in New York, NY. If we rely upon the aesthetic of our art and say, Here it is. And to have somebody really sort of advocating, you know, going to bat for them the way he does, you know, with the Corpus Rubenianum especially, but, you know, with everything. So. [00:58:00]. [00:20:00] Yes, there was, of course, The Massacre of The Innocents by Rubens, which made 45 million, and two days later, for a relative bargain, a van Dyck of that painting, done in the studio at the same time, came on the marketa drawing of that painting. She just, actually, sold one of my earliest acquisitions to one of her collectors because, you know, now I'm not so focused on that. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yes. In their day, they weren't particularly valuable, which is why they're strewn all over Boston. I was in the running, and I lost it marginally. [00:38:02]. And I remember having sort of a few passing conversations. I saw people. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Spent one year there. Now you've got that top strata, which will always be high and going higher. So, around that time, I had met a few dealers in the Old Master world, and I did start to either back or buy with the intention of selling, which I hadn't done before. JUDITH RICHARDS: Do you speak to art historians who have. And there was one large mud sculpture of a horse on the floor in the lobby at Best Products. JUDITH RICHARDS: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:02], CLIFFORD SCHORER: Well, that touches on another one of my collecting areas, actually. And, you know, so I finally acquiesced. I probably only have maybe 20 pieces left.

CLIFFORD SCHORER: And that'sshe may be retired now.

So I still, to this dayI mean, I'm building two buildings as we speak, and I'm running back and forth doing concrete pours, because I love that. And the museum is making ambitious purchases.

CLIFFORD SCHORER: You have to rein me in when I go off on tangents.

And actually, it was very similar to my grandfather, which was not his son but his son-in-law. And, obviously, that is the sort of the genesis of the great collections that just got given to Boston. I meansomething very strangebut nothing, no art. I went to Harvard, I said, "I've got to get the microfilm for the Medici Archive." So I wrote to her several times and said, you know, "Is this Crespi? There's one area I meant to touch on, and that is the competition, the relatively recent change, as you talked about the auction houses becoming retail and directly competing with galleries, even though galleries offer this tremendous educational service. CLIFFORD SCHORER: For theyou know, luckily, we have the sands of time to wear away the lesser works from the, you know, from the museum-quality question of whether an Old Master belongs in a museum. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So, to me, that was that was very exciting. But I wouldn't have purchased the ongoing operation of the business. These are salient works in, you know, in the catalogue, and these are works that the gallery had a historical involvement with in the 19th century. CLIFFORD SCHORER: No, that's changed. JUDITH RICHARDS: Were therewas it a big decision for you to become involved on that level with. CLIFFORD SCHORER: that's fair. Located in the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture (8th and F Streets NW), Size: 5 sound files (3 hr., 57 min.) So today I actually have two paintings from that same series. So it's extremely exciting thatyou know, and I believe 23 of the paintings are known. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah, the experiences, the moments, and all of that. So I asked my partnerI said, "Call over the person here. And knowing, of course, that, you know, in a way, sort of on day one, my business challenge was to take a business that was burning, you know, [] 8 million in losses, and flip it off instantly and reopen it as a business that would basically break even or make money, because I was not in the business of buying a company simply to continue the legacy losses of the previous ownership.

CLIFFORD SCHORER: No, no, so I had minor collecting in that area, JUDITH RICHARDS: While you were collecting. They were able to sell the parts of the collection that were not museum-worthy, but they raised a tremendous amount of money. CLIFFORD SCHORER: That is from my paleontological collecting. He was a very important stamp collector. We made pigments; we ground pigments; we made egg tempera. And, you know, from there I was able to turn more of my attention. They've become broad-market marketing techniques.

JUDITH RICHARDS: Had you had a chance to go to Europe by that time? [Laughs.] You had to go to the big card catalogues and pick out something. It sounds like the word "scholarly" is very key, that your approach is scholarly. Schorer discusses growing up in Massachusetts and Long Island, New York; his family and his Dutch and German heritage, and his grandparents' collecting endeavors, especially in the field of philately; his reluctance to complete a formal high school education and his subsequent enrollment in the University Professors Program at Boston University; his work as a self-taught computer programmer beginning at the age of 16; his first businesses as an entrepreneur; the beginnings of his collection of Chinese export and Imperial ceramics and his self-study in the field; his experiences at a young age at art auctions in the New England area; his travels to Montreal and Europe, especially to Eastern Europe, Paris, and London, and his interest in world history; his decision to exit the world of collecting Chinese porcelain and his subsequent interest in Old Master paintings, especially Italian Baroque.

He lived until I was 13 years old. We do TEFAF New York, TEFAF Maastricht, Masterpiece. And has that changed over the years? [Laughs.]. I mean, not because it wasit was cheap. So several years later he passed away, and apparently they hadn't yet sold the Procaccini. the answer is definitively, "No." You know, it was this incredibly complex. [4] In 2008, they took it to a recording of Antiques Roadshow where it was identified by Philip Mould as a work by Homer and valued at 30,000. You know, it was important to me that that's the type of person, you know, sink or swim, whetheryou know, I didn't want a shark. It was [Carlo] Maratti. For the first time in the UK, we present an overview of Winslow Homer (18361910), the great American Realist painter who confronted the leading issues facing the United States, and its relationship with both Europe and the Caribbean world, in the final decades of the 19th century. And we're not really going to move into, you know, Ab Ex or anything, you know, sort ofWorld War II, I think, is kind of where I get a nosebleed, because it starts to get into other people's knowledge base and other people's territory. Schorer also describes his discovery of the Worcester Art Museum and his subsequent work there on the Museum's board and as president; his interest in paleontology and his current house by Walter Gropius in Provincetown, MA; his involvement with the purchase and support of Agnew's Gallery based in London, UK, and his work with its director, Anthony Crichton-Stuart; his thoughts on marketing at art shows and adapting Agnew's to the changing market for the collecting of Old Masters; the differences between galleries and auction houses in the art market today; and his expectations for his collection in the future. Then we have a Guercino that came up in New Hampshire that I discovered, but unfortunately, other people recognized it, too, so they drove it up to the sky. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So I think of storage as storage, but just good climate control. You know, this sheet, that sheet, squares. A picture should not reappear three times [laughs] on the market. And it was an area I didn't know, and you know. [Laughs.] And then, you know, I appreciate it; even if they don't know who I am, I appreciate it. And so, in this case, weyou know, I really got ready for it, and I expected it to be, you know, the same price as the last time, and I was prepared for that. But, but then, you know, many, many years later, basically, it was all dissipated. So you haveyou know, you haveif you added all of that up and then inflated that with inflation, it probably still wouldn't equal one major sale today, because art inflation is actually much higher than monetary inflation. [1] I can't play anymore. And the angels that were attending Marythe detail that got me was they had a sunburn, but the straps of their sandals had fallen down, and you could see the outline of the sunburn where their sandal straps were. But I didn't buy it with much of a focus on the painting itself. If these people figure in. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Well, certainly, don't destroy the art if you can avoid it. So I go in there, find thisthere's this little Plexiglas box, and inside this Plexiglas box is the most breathtaking bronze I have ever seen. I mean, obviously, the team is small, so we have to pick our battles carefully.

[Laughs.] I'd probably be better off. And sure enough, like a year later, the bronze show comes to London, and there it is with thein fullyou know, 100 greatest objects in bronze. They got the Bacon as the plum to borrow the Rembrandt. I mean, you know, he opens the drawers of his metals, and we pull them out, and, you know, it's a great experience. Those are the ones where you go three days withof everyone presenting their papers, and then you have a Q&A at the end, and you can't shut people up because they're soyou know, they're fuming over what they've watched for three days. WebAn art expert spotted it was signed by renowned American landscape painter Winslow Homer. JUDITH RICHARDS: I mean, certainly in the war zone [laughs], I suspect you were on your own. I liked heavy curtains. CLIFFORD SCHORER: And often, those are the ones I cannot afford under any circumstances. I'm thinking that we want Agnew's to be scaled for the marketplace, and I don't think that being that large is the correct scale today. And, you know, obviously, I've been concerned about the state of that scholarship, which I think of late has been very much slanted towards the marketplace. You talked about improving the collection; are you continually culling and, as you buy better examples, selling lesser examples? And then when they referred you to something else that was interesting, I would go look at that. JUDITH RICHARDS: Oh. JUDITH RICHARDS: Yeah. JUDITH RICHARDS: Just a sense of knowing what the price should be, JUDITH RICHARDS: or what's been bid in the past, JUDITH RICHARDS: what it sold at so that you don't feel. Not that my collection is that important, but even the idea that I'm sort of peeling off the wheat from the chaff in any way.

JUDITH RICHARDS: And you bought it? CLIFFORD SCHORER: It was a good, you know, three or four years of financing deals that, you know, I found particularly exciting and interesting, and the paintings that we were ablethat I was able to sort of touch in an abstract way were paintings I could never otherwise touch. I can't remember that. I mean, I certainlyI met people. You know, they're, JUDITH RICHARDS: Are thereare there any particular scholars that have taken this very broad approach to art history who were important to you? JUDITH RICHARDS: Let's say the deluxe model. Is that whole chapter of, CLIFFORD SCHORER: So that whole story is fresh scholarship. I mean, I know that. And the market was not very discerning, because there were enough people in it to absorb all that material. CLIFFORD SCHORER: No. And now, it's a city of, you know, 100,000 Ph.D.s, who all have good income, but they don't support institutions. World War II. And, of course, the idea they were in Egypt would add to that kind of, you know, sort of desert mystique of the whole thing. I agree with you that, obviously, as you come to knowand there's a downside to that, too. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. ", So he called them over, and I said, "This is amazing, but why is this an antiquity? It's oftenit's often not of the period. So I started looking at Daniele Crespi. And Cliff, my father, is the same name as myself, as is my grandfather. Let's keep that." CLIFFORD SCHORER: Yeah, that's like $100,000 to half a million, and that's not the weakest. CLIFFORD SCHORER: The MFA. But for me, it's the combination of the conception and the craft, so the conception is very important to me; knowing that [Guido] Reni stole his figure from the Apollo Belvedere because it was here when he was there is interesting to me and Iyou know, to find that out, if I didn't know it before, either by accident or by some kind person sharing it with me, I'myou know, it adds a layer to my experience of the art that's different from my aesthetic experience of the art. JUDITH RICHARDS: Mm-hmm. Transcript is available on the Archives of American Art's website. It's a private, JUDITH RICHARDS: Is there any indication that it's from you, CLIFFORD SCHORER: No, no, it says "Private. They said, "If you take the car, you'll be murdered." Not known took a long time ; there was one large mud sculpture a. 'M ever going to sue you. they recognize your interest, experiences. Many, many, many, many, many years later he away... 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"I want to collect from the beginning, in the early 18th century, to the present; I wantI want this kind of collection or that kind of collection? And that risk is that that day, that buyer is not in the room. But I went away, you know, tail between my legs, because it was absolutely unattainable for me. [Affirmative.] You know, bringing an efficiency model to a museum can destroy a museum. CLIFFORD SCHORER: the natural entre into it. JUDITH RICHARDS: Did youdid you make all those design decisions yourself?

You know, it's ait's a story of ruination. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Sobut anyway, I mean, it's. And I was still trying to buy, you know, what I could buy with a little bit of money in the stamps and coins world. And I became first in my class so I could not go back. JUDITH RICHARDS: So you're notit sounds like you're not sure you will go back to collecting for yourself. CLIFFORD SCHORER: It's a long, convoluted history, but basically lots of research, lots of phone calls, and everyone knowing that I'm on the hunt for Procaccini. CLIFFORD SCHORER: It was very dingy and dark, but it still was a masterpiece. But I think that what keeps you in historic art is that that often is where your passion is, and you're bucking the trend, the business trend, but I think that, you know, it provides you with such personal satisfaction. So when I came back to New York, basically, I figured out how I could do it. CLIFFORD SCHORER: You know, and everything else in Amsterdam. [Laughs.]. That's always fun. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Bless you. So it comes up at Sotheby's. So I think that the understanding was there that I was going to do it, so, you know, might as well support him in that decision and then see what happens.

[00:46:01]. CLIFFORD SCHORER: So, no. JUDITH RICHARDS: Mm-hmm.

CLIFFORD SCHORER: and we put a Reynolds. And the Chinese think less about that as deceit than we do. Have you ever thought of writing about the works? It took a long time; there was a, JUDITH RICHARDS: They have their own restoration. So I didn't go back. And I thought that was very, veryit was really very nice, because I would just come over and talk about art. JUDITH RICHARDS: And most of the people bidding at auction in those days were the wholesalers. I couldn't sort of spur of the moment go say, Oh, buy this because it's very interesting.

I'm in Southborough, Massachusetts.

JUDITH RICHARDS: In other words, being generous with attributions? I mean, it startedso you started collecting in that area or just that one piece? And the advance guard, I remember the night the advance guard came to the first Skinner auction. JUDITH RICHARDS: You can be foolish when you're that age. CLIFFORD SCHORER: No. So I was. [00:12:00]. So those were always fun and, again, because a Crespi comes top of mind, there were three Crespis that came up that I was able to buy and reattribute to Crespi, and now they're accepted. Like a Boule chandelier. It's a very long cycle, so you can't think about it as "I need a salary this year," you know, from the ownership standpoint. And by the time I was born, he was deceased and the family was bankrupt.

It was one of several works that Homer is thought to have created during a mid-1870s visit to Virginia, where he had served for a time as a Union war correspondent during the Civil War. JUDITH RICHARDS: But you would still be in conflict. And said that "If you don't fire him, I'm going to sue you." So my father was encouraged by that, and sort of dragged me on a little field trip to Boston and took me around to the colleges. And I'll explain, "Well, actually, they won't charge you zero. JUDITH RICHARDS: Did you talk to him about collecting at all? So, anyway, you know, then, at some point, I fixated on the idea that maybe I would do something a little more serious in the art market. CLIFFORD SCHORER: I'm sure it was all an interest in history. Born on February 24 1836, he was well known for painting marine subjects.

[Laughs.]. So back then, you know, I did a lot of assembly code, and COBOL, and MDBS. JUDITH RICHARDS: Have there been anythis might be my last question. That's all. You know, because she died in this plague. JUDITH RICHARDS: Were there particular acquisitions that you really were excited about that you discovered?

And if I understood all those things, and we had a yes, then they had my money, but otherwiseso, for them, I think often, you know, I was not the first choice. So I got in my car and I drove over there at lunchtime, and I walked through the whole building, and literally, there was nobody there.

Their collection was just chock-a-block with things that had nothing to do with museum collections. CLIFFORD SCHORER: Putting aside in storage happened organically, because by the time I was three years into my house, I had more than I could use in my house. And that was really my main goal.